It must first be acknowledged that science fiction films of the silent era, and
even of the early sound era, remain a significantly unexplored area. Every new
investigation along a different research vector may bring to light a few more
obscure items to consider; every year, a film previously believed to be lost
may be rediscovered, carefully restored, and released for viewing. Having
almost abandoned work on this chapter before stumbling upon other significant
films to discuss, I cannot be confident that I have now dealt with all relevant
works, and while I have strived to be reasonably thorough, it is likely that
future researchers in this area will lambaste me for my shameful omissions.

To
be sure, it is also likely that the space films before 1950s that I have not
seen or considered will prove to be insignificant, from the perspective of the
spacesuit film; because virtually all films involving space travel prior to
1950 tended to follow certain conventions. While they might seem moderately
plausible in depicting the building of spacecraft and the preparations for
launching, in light of then-current technology, they tend to become less and
less realistic the further they get away from Earth. In particular, space
travelers are never concerned about possible dangers in outer space: during
their flights, they wear either street clothes or outfits modeled on the
clothing of early aviators, like jackets and goggles; they never experience
zero gravity or worry about meteors; and when they land on another planet, they
step out of their spaceships completely unprotected, confident that they will
encounter a breathable atmosphere, suitable temperature, and beings that
usually look and act exactly like humans.

The
first of these films, George Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip
to the Moon) (1902), is generally characterized as completely farcical, but
this is not entirely true, since this short film does begin with a somewhat
serious discussion amongst learned astronomers regarding how a flight to the
Moon might be accomplished, and subsequent scenes depicting the construction of
the space gun and the vehicle for the space travelers seem reasonably well
grounded in the available technology of the time as it might have been applied
to the challenge of space flight. However, having a chorus line of beautiful
girls push the vehicle into position to be launched signals a weakening impulse
to project any aura of authenticity, and once the capsule is shot into space, a
decisive shift to pure fantasy is announced by a scene in which the capsule
buries itself in the eye of an animated Man in the Moon, followed by equally
unrealistic scenes involving the travelers moving about on the Moon in street
clothes and encountering fantastic creatures. Still, one can recognize this brief
film as a precursor to two later film traditions involving spacesuits: its
generally comic tone anticipates the humorous spacesuit film, while its
menacing Selenites (eventually defeated when it is discovered that they
disintegrate when struck) are arguably the first of the space monsters that
will later epitomize the horrific spacesuit film.

To
consider three later films of a similar nature, Méliès soon made another film
featuring space travel, Le Voyage à Travers
l'Impossible (The Impossible Voyage) (1904), which is more fanciful
in all respects, in that it involves a group of travelers who voyage to the Sun
inside a runaway train. However, it might be noted that the way the train is
sent flying through space, by speeding it up a high mountain, is not unlike the
ramp employed to launch a spacecraft in When Worlds Collide (1951), and
the film has one evocative scene of the train speeding through the blackness of
space, passing by the planets, before the train is swallowed by the mouth of
the Sun's face and the travelers land upon a hot but absurdly habitable Sun.
There is also a little-known curiosity, Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón's Excursion
dans la Lune (Excursion to the Moon) (1908), which is for the most
part a blatant copy of Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune with a few
interesting variations. The projectile here is loaded into the space cannon not
by scantily-clad women, but more realistically by uniformed soldiers; the
capsule does not hit the Man in the Moon (portrayed by an actual human face) in
the eye, but is rather swallowed by him; and while the residents of the Moon
again include costumed acrobats who vanish at a touch, the visitors are also
entertained in the court of the lunar king by a group of lovely female dancers,
anticipating later films like Cat-Women of the Moon that would similarly
inhabit the Moon with beautiful women, and one of them is abducted by the Earth
men and taken back to Earth with them. A better-known film inspired by Méliès
was British director Walter Booth's The ? Motorist (1906), in which a
motorist drives his automobile up a building, through the sky, on top of a
cloud, around the Moon, and around the rings of Saturn before he falls to the
Earth in the middle of a courtroom. In these and other short films providing
fanciful sequences of space travel, including Chomón's Voyage
sur Jupiter (1909) and Enrico Novelli's Un Matrimonio Interplanetario
(1910), however, there was never any effort to portray space travel plausibly.

A later silent film, Yakov Protazanov's Aelita:
Queen of Mars (1924), was reasonably realistic in envisioning a spaceship
to Mars being constructed by an engineer named Los (Nikolai Tsereteli), based
on plans he had carefully prepared. However, while the spacecraft's exterior
looks plausible enough, the interior appears identical to a spacious room in a
house, despite pieces of equipment in the background, and the conclusion of the
flight seems as fanciful as A Trip to the Moon: the ship crash-lands on
Mars, but the three crew members emerge unharmed into a completely Earthlike
environment and immediately encounter Martians who seem exactly like human
beings. (A few Martians do wear costumes and helmets that resemble spacesuits,
but they cannot be protective in nature, since other Martians survive perfectly
well while wearing normal, or very little, clothing.) After Los has a romantic
encounter with the Martian queen Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva), who had been
longingly observing him from Mars, and after his crewmate Gusev (Nikolai
Batalov) leads a Communist revolution of the oppressed Martian workers, the
entire flight and the landing on Mars are revealed to be nothing more than
Los's dreams, which completely invalidates any idea that the film was arguing
in favor of the practicality of space travel. The significance of Aelita
is that, along with Himmelskibet, it anticipates a third tradition of
spacesuit films, the melodramatic spacesuit films, in which space travelers
encounter aliens who are identical to human beings and become embroiled in
situations that are exactly like conventional conflicts on Earth.

What
may be the first talking film to depict space travel, Just Imagine
(1930), is generally described as the first science fiction musical, though by
modern standards it would only be considered a romantic comedy with a few
musical numbers. Its central story involves a man of the year 1980, J-21 (John
Garrick), who is being forbidden by law to marry the girl he loves, LN-18
(Maureen O'Sullivan), because he is deemed insufficiently accomplished. To win
his appeal of the decision, he agrees to become the first person to fly to Mars
in an experimental spacecraft built by renowned inventor Z-4 (Hobart Bosworth);
accompanying him are his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson) and a man from the
past, 1930, Single O (El Brendel), who has recently been brought back to life
after he was struck by a lightning bolt in 1930. While the film's focus is
usually on the mildly amusing antics of vaudeville comedian Brendel, the film
is momentarily serious when Z-4 tells J-21 why it is important for someone to
undertake this mission:

[Z-4]
Thousands of years ago, man wondered what was across the river. Then he went
over and found out. Later, Columbus wondered what was across the ocean, and he
went over and found out. Since then, men have sought for and learned every
secret of the Earth—on the land, in the water, in the air. But there is one
secret, the greatest of all, that remains a mystery.
[J-21]
And that is ... ?
[Z-4]
The planet Mars!

This qualifies
as an interesting early argument in favor of space travel, contextualizing such
endeavors as a natural continuation of humanity's ancient quest to learn about
new and distant realms.

As
for the spaceship itself, while it is powered by an otherwise-unexplained "gravity
neutralizer," it looks very much like a standard rocketship, although it blasts
off horizontally like the rocketships of later serials. Furthermore, the
travelers do not wear spacesuits or experience zero gravity, but there is one
touch of realism during their journey, an image of distant Earth against a
black sky filled with stars. Once they reach Mars, though, a spirit of
absurdity returns, since they find the planet inhabited by a mixture of
friendly and hostile humans wearing odd, skimpy costumes (all Martians, they
deduce, are twins, one good and one bad); but the Martians at least do not
speak English, and there is a rare acknowledgement that conditions there are
different than Earth when the travelers effortlessly move their large spaceship
around into position for liftoff, an ability explicitly attributed to Mars's
lower gravity. That lower gravity would necessarily mean a thinner atmosphere,
naturally, is never acknowledged.

Another
film, Things to Come (1936), is more serious and realistic than these
predecessors, which is natural enough given that its screenplay was based on a
novel by, and written by, renowned science fiction writer H. G. Wells. Yet this
chronicle of humanity's future only involves space travel in its concluding
scenes, wherein an advanced future civilization undertakes the construction of
an immense "space gun" to launch a manned rocket, resembling a cross between a
spaceship and a bullet, which is designed to circumnavigate the Moon. Interestingly,
the drama of these scenes involves a mob of people who are determined to
prevent the flight, which makes this one of the first science fiction stories
to envision opposition to space travel and foreshadows the efforts to prevent a
pioneering space flight which will be observed in Destination Moon.
However, the film entirely avoids the question of what might actually happen to
its passengers during the flight by ending the story with the rocket's
departure being observed by two speechifying spectators, Oswald Cabal (Raymond
Massey) and Raymond Passworthy (Edward Chapman). Still, despite the fact that
its two space travelers do not wear spacesuits, this classic film merits some
attention in this survey because Cabal's final speech offers a singularly
eloquent vision of a human destiny to conquer the universe which, in a sense,
makes it the first film to present the full potential range of possibilities in
the spacesuit film:

Rest enough for the individual man—too much, and too
soon—and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on,
conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and
then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about
him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered
all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be
beginning.

Strangely
enough, at the precise time that the British Wells was articulating this
glorious vision of humanity's glorious future in space, American filmmakers
were in the process of presenting space travel solely as a novel pathway to the
sorts of juvenile adventures that had long appealed to young audiences. Taking
their inspiration from two popular comic strips of the day featuring space
adventurers, they produced four Saturday-morning serials, three starring Flash
Gordon (Flash Gordon [1936], Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars [1938],
and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe [1940]) and one featuring another
hero, Buck Rogers (1939), which all were later reedited as feature films
for television and videocassette release. These four narratives deal with space
flight entirely by means of brief transitional scenes displaying squat
rocketships, with sparks emerging from their rear ends, that take off and fly
horizontally through the sky more like an airplane than a spaceship; these are
always viewed in flight only against the backdrop of an atmosphere, and never
the blackness of outer space. Furthermore, the alien worlds visited in these
serials may be inhabited by exotic but humanoid creatures like the Hawk Men and
Rock Men encountered by Flash Gordon or the Zuggs that Buck Rogers meets on
Saturn, but the planets' environments were otherwise identical to Earth; we may
be told that Saturn's atmospheric pressure is ten times greater than Earth's,
but visiting humans breath normally while on the planet, and while the evil
Ming's minions may at times wear metal masks over their faces, these are
clearly not airtight and are in no way related to actual spacesuits.

Evaluated
as portrayals of space travel, the Flash Gordon serials are the silliest: Flash
Gordon (Buster Crabbe) and his colleagues Dale Arden (Jean Rogers, Carol
Hughes) and Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) never wear any special clothing when they
fly into space, their spaceship features an incongruous periscope borrowed from
the design of a submarine, and their adventures tend to involve a single space
flight to another planet, either Mongo or Mars, where they stay to struggle
against the schemes of the villainous emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles
Middleton) until they finally triumph and return to Earth. During these
sojourns, they may occasionally get into their spaceship or battle against
Ming's spaceships, but these vehicles always stay within the atmosphere.

The
Buck Rogers serial was marginally more realistic; if they are not wearing
spacesuits, Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe) and his crew at least are dressed like
aviators of the day, a modest acknowledgment that space travel might demand special
garments, and their efforts to defeat the future Earth's dictator, Killer Kane
(Anthony Warde), with the help of virtuous but easily deluded Saturnians
involve several trips from Earth to Saturn and back, with the story's shifting
locales signaled by establishing shots of either Earth or Saturn, observed
against a black background with stars, which fleetingly provided an authentic
image of outer space. Finally, amidst a crisis during Buck's first flight into
space, there is a brief mention of the ship's "oxygen tanks," though these
appear to be there as part of the propulsion system and not to help the space
travelers breathe during their journey.

It
is easy to laugh at these serials when they are viewed today, but their lasting
impact cannot be denied: they served as the model for a number of melodramatic
spacesuit films and television programs of the early 1950s (as will be
discussed), including series featuring Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and their
influence can also be strongly felt in what became the major space franchises
of recent decades, Star Trek and Star Wars. (Indeed, after the
success of his American Graffiti [1973], George Lucas had initially
planned to film a new version of Flash Gordon, and it was only when he
proved unable to obtain the rights to the character that he decided to instead
develop the original space adventure he would call Star Wars [1977].)

However,
for whatever reasons one might have for celebrating these serials and the other
early space films, there were only three films before 1950 that were truly
breaking new ground in offering plausible predictions of human space travel:
Danish director Holger-Madsen's Himmelskibet, which acknowledges the
potential dangers of outer space by having its space travelers briefly don crude
spacesuits; the German Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's Frau imMond,
accurately described by David Wingrove as "the first realistic space film
about a journey to the Moon" (Science Fiction Film Source Book 47); and
a less renowned Russian successor, Vasili
Zhuravlev's KosmicheskiyReys, which drew upon the expertise of
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It is with these films, which demand more detailed
attention, that the saga of the spacesuit film truly begins.